An exhibition of photographs by local Sunshine Coast-based artist Katrina Lezaic opens at the Butter Factory Arts Centre in Cooroy on 19 February.
“Hill Spirits” captures images of children against the Arcadian backdrop of a property owned by a friend of the artist on the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
Lezaic’s photographs expose the rarely seen intimacy of a rural childhood. Rooted in place, her images are inseparable from Australian history and lore where wild spaces are foundational.
The landscapes in the series glow with a morbid luminescence and reflect the region’s complex hidden histories, while echoing the discomfort in Australian narratives visible since Frederick McCubbin’s Lost 1886, and more recent apocalyptic stories of children managing alone.
These enigmatic portraits of children draw us to themes of self-sufficiency, resilience and the shared pandemic-driven experience of isolation.
Cultural Development Officer (Noosa Council) Belinda Simonsen said, “I see the work as quite dystopian and reflecting a lot of young adult fiction that has come out in the last ten to fifteen years (like Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Tomorrow When the War Began, Allegiant).“
“It also reflects the current anxiety about absent parents and unsupervised children managing their own lives (and achieving varying degrees of success),“ she said.
These images are gritty yet seductive, with a nostalgic realism that opens the landscape to a sense of both age-old mysteries and discovery by an artist with a fresh view of the complexities of this place.
Katrina Lezaic is an Australian conceptual artist exploring fraught social narratives and universal predicaments by creating photographic images to inform and transform the present. She studied photography at the College of Fine Art in Sydney and has been a freelance writer and reporter for urban newspapers for over a decade.
Blurring the lines between the private and public, voyeuristic and theatrical, her photographic work has recently been exhibited at Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Bondi Pavilion Gallery, Gaffa Gallery, The City Recital Hall, and at The Other Art Fair in Sydney.
The exhibition opens on Friday 19 February at 6pm and will be on until Sunday 21 March, Tuesday through Sunday, 10am to 3pm.
